


Loose Ends

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:19:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Spinoff Story, taken from the Shadowplay arc. Prowl's uncovering a mystery in Translucentia Heights: Nightbeat gets a handful of loose ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loose Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Just as a silly homage to my love of film noir, the first half is written a la screenplay. I know some people nope out of screenplay formats, so I figured it's worth warning.
> 
> On a MORE AWESOME note look at this  Sallycandance did for me!

 

EXT: BLACK DISSOLVE INTO NEON STREETS OF RODION, NIGHT. ROADS ARE RAIN SLICKED AND EMPTY, DEBRIS AGAINST BUILDINGS.

 

VOICEOVER

Seen enough of these mean streets to glare right back into 'em.  Seen enough not to flinch when a mech's spark just gutters out and you can see the light fade from his optics.  Seen enough to know when something's so dirty it'll never be cleaned.  
  
Seen just about everything, I thought, till that night.

EXT: PAN MOVES THROUGH STREETS TO SHOW A RUN DOWN HOSTEL, SIGN IN HALF-DARK LETTERS READING ‘SL_D_S”.

VOICEOVER  
Damnedest thing.  Seen my share of scared faces, but none that ever looked so...ill-fitting. Like it wasn't the right face, somehow.  Fear does weird things to people, fear and desperation.

It's hard to keep the distance, times like that.  Hard to remember it's just a job, just your job, hard to remember that one mech's life isn't worth all that much.

EXT: A TRAILER WITH ‘SECURITY’ EMBLAZONED ON THE SIDE, DISSOLVE TO INTERIOR, WALLS COVERED IN BLINKING LIGHTS AND SURVEILLANCE EQUIPMENT.

VOICEOVER

I prefer to work alone.  Always have, always will.  Not like I’ve got anything—okay, much—against people.  Not much faith left to lose, that’s all.

Just that to do my job, I needed to be clear of distractions.

Because that’s what others were, too often—distractions.  You picked up on others’ energy, and a nervous mech just sets everything off too much, like a bad crystal in a harmonic drive, souring the whole scale. I need a clear head, calm cortex, because this work was too important to be distracted and every note had to sound out true.  So I got in the habit of shutting myself in the small mobile work cube, like a ritual, letting the silence fall around me, alone with my thoughts and the shadows.

INT:  SHIFT TO NIGHTBEAT’S FACE, LIT FROM BELOW.

It felt like home, here, mobile, portable, safe.

EXT:  DOLLY SHOT ALONG THE STREET, CIRCLING AROUND THE HOSTEL

VOICEOVER:

Well, as safe as anything in a world that seemed to sink further every day into corruption and badness like succumbing to a gravity well, every trace of light decaying.

INT: SLIDE’S HOSTEL. A DINGY ROOM, FADED WALLS, BATTERED DESK WITH A SPILLED BOTTLE OF ENGEX, A SOLE LIGHT FIXTURE FLICKERING ON THE CEILING, HALF-CAPTURING A PRONE FORM OF AN UNCONSCIOUS MECH.

VOICEOVER:

This was a tense one, and it takes a moment for the silence to fall its soft folds around me.  I call up  the official report, skimming the Quad Orientation report: who, what, where, when with the usual lack of expectation.  Nothing about the how, of course, or the why, which were always the important ones, at least for this job.

And sometimes, even the Quad Report was more hindrance than help.  This feels like one of those times.  A mech had apparently suddenly appeared, raving and incoherent, and taken the hostel’s night manager hostage.  Sounded more like tabloid than policing, the stuff of some sordid holovid, cheap drama, soft-sell propaganda for the Dangerous World.

INTERIOR, SLIDE’S: ANOTHER FIGURE MOVES INTO THE SHOT, WOBBLY, OPTICS WIDE AND DISTRESSED.

VOICEOVER:

To me, though, these were always puzzles, and I’m one of the best at puzzling them out. Sounds like bragging, maybe, but I have the wall of awards to back me up.  Only thing wrong with that is a lot of those awards were earned on the helms of dead mechs.

I tapped a code on the work cube console, a signal to the SigInt agent outside to activate the secured communicube they’d thrown into the hostel manager’s office.  It would give three bright pulses of light—enough to get attention, not enough to alarm or blind (at least that was the theory, and all the gear heads and their science agreed, so who was I to question)—before the link opened, and I got ready to see…well, what there was to see.

INTERIOR, SLIDE’S: A FLASHING LIGHT FROM THE FLOOR TO THE LEFT OF THE DESK.  THE DISTRESSED MECH JOLTS, STARTLED AND EDGES OVER TO IT.

VOICEOVER:

What there was to see was the  frantic face, ill-fitting, twisted with fear, peering into the communicube, as though his optics were barely functional. “Who’s that?”  The voice sounded strange, raspy, half out of phase.

INTERIOR: SECURITY CUBE, CAMERA MOVING AROUND NIGHTBEAT AS HE BENDS OVER THE SCREEN, ONE HAND TAPPING ON ANOTHER CONSOLE.

VOICEOVER:

“Name’s Nightbeat,” I say, with that friendly half-shrug that adds ‘nah, you never heard of me’.  All that official verbiage in the manual, the whole formal introduction, the practiced phrase, including the flat dictation of ‘I’m here to help’ often just put the perps on edge.  I can’t blame ‘em, really. The whole thing had the stink of formula, and formula stank of trap. It was always easier to go in as buddies.  Buddies.  Equals working toward the same goal.  It just happened that that goal often led to the other guy in jail.  “Hear you’re having a rough night.”

INTERIOR: SLADE’S: THE MECH’S OPTICS SHOOT INTO THE ROOM’S CORNERS, SCUTTLING BACK AGAINST THE WALL, SO HE VIEWS THE CUBE FROM BETWEEN UPRAISED KNEES. HE LAUGHS. IT SOUNDS JAGGED AND ROUGH. THE REST OF THE SCENE IS DIEGETIC, THOUGH STILL OBVIOUSLY IN NIGHTBEAT’S FLASHBACK.

STREAKER:

 “Rough night? Rough _night_? Yeah, you could say that.”  

NIGHTBEAT:

 “I’d rather hear it from you.”

STREAKER—NERVOUS, TENSE, JABBING A HAND AT THE CUBE ACCUSINGLY:

“Yeah? Why should I tell you anything? Ain’t you the Sec?”

NIGHTBEAT:

“I am. But let’s be honest: there are two ways this ends, friend. You walk out, or you’re carried out.”

VOICEOVER:

A sudden hush, the face withdrawing into shadow and for a brief klik, I wondered if the instincts had failed, so early, if I’d overstepped myself.  It wasn’t about lying, despite what Quark said, just playing fast and loose with truth, sometimes massaging it, sometimes slicing it into strips so thin the day would shine through. Dirty games, but it was a dirty world.

STREAKER SITS BACK, FACE DISAPPEARING INTO SHADOW

 “Why you care?”

NIGHTBEAT’S VOICE FROM THE CUBE:

“Because I do.”  

VOICEOVER:

 

Because I’m an idiot, despite everything I’ve seen, he added. Because he could still see this perp, stare him in the optics and see only someone lonely and scared, almost begging to be talked out of whatever he’d gotten himself into. He wanted a lifeline, a rope out. And it seemed he didn’t care too much where that rope was tied off.

STREAKER, WARY

“You don’t know me.”

NIGHTBEAT’S VOICE:

“Good point. Let’s start with that. I told you my name. You…?”

STREAKER, WHO LOOKS CONFUSED, HESITATES:

 “Streaker.”

NIGHTBEAT’S VOICE:

“Hey, Streaker.”  

VOICEOVER SOUNDING LIKE THIS PART IS WHERE IT GETS DARK.

Another smile, hiding while I keyed the name into the work cube’s database. It didn’t take long, the display popping up beyond the cube’s holoprojection.  Streaker. Sure thing. Only…Streaker was listed as an airframe, and I was seeing groundkibble.

NIGHTBEAT (DIEGETIC)

Really rough night. A WHISTLE. Guessing there was a snafu at the Relinquishment Clinic.  

VOICEOVER:

Some guess, huh? When a jet shows up in a grounder’s body? Someone’s playing a shell game.

STREAKER, STARTLED, THEN TERRIFIED, THEN COLLAPSED, FACE CRUMPLING INWARD.

 “I—I don’t even know who this is, that I’m in.”

VOICEOVER

I couldn’t hide the grimace. Yeah, that would be a tough one.  

NIGHTBEAT (DIEGETIC):

“One thing at a time, Streaker.”  

VOICEOVER:

Crazy? On Syk?  Could be.  But he’s been rational enough with me so far. I wanted to see if his story strung together, little beads of order against the chaos of the dark city.

STREAKER, VOICE SMALL AND SWIRLY, LIKE SOMEONE ABOUT TO THROW UP. A THUDDING CRASH, AND A FLARE OF TOO BRIGHT OPTICS.

“I don’t feel so good,”

INTERIOR: SECURITY CUBE, NIGHTBEAT’S FACE LOOKING WORRIED FOR A KLIK BEFORE MASKING IT WITH SOMETHING A LITTLE TOO NEUTRAL.

VOICEOVER

I failed at hiding the frown that would have given everything away if I’d honestly thought Streaker could even focus on it clearly.  Just a matter of time before the rest of Streaker’s spark gave in, collapsing under the weight like a neutron star.  The Relinquishment Clinics were all full of promises, assurances of safety, lists of safeguards and all that, but let’s face it: if they were wrong, you were dead.

Dead mechs didn’t sue.

And I’ve been around enough to know I was looking at a dead mech right now, and he had the feeling Streaker knew it too.  Everyone got the warning, everyone signed the forms—no one thought it would happen. Spark degradation.

And fast, too, for this poor sprocket. He must’ve Relinqed before.

EXTERIOR, CUBE MOVING TO SLIDE’S:

“Hang in there, guy,” I said, the closest I could come to a lie, ignoring the truth, pretending there was a ‘there’ for Streaker to hang in. If Streaker was on a running-down clock, least I could do was to get as much information from him as possible, find out the mystery of his death, at least, even though that did nothing to fix the hole that had been his life.

INTERIOR, THROUGH WINDOW TO ENTER SLIDE’S, SWIRLING AROUND THE OFFICE, CATCHING ON THE BROKEN GLASS, A HOLE PUNCHED IN A WALL THAT SPOKE OF RECENT VIOLENCE.

NIGHTBEAT:

Let’s start at the beginning. You, the Relinquishment Clinic.

STREAKER, STAMMERING, WEAK, CAMERA FINDING HIS FACE.

Yeahhhhhh. PAUSE.   I needed money. Just some shanix, to tide me over. Had a job lined up. Everything.  PAUSE, STRUGGLING FOR BREATH. I’m dying, aren’t I?

VOICEOVER

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, the words thick in my vocalizer. Right. Just…you know, don’t worry about that dying thing you’re doing.  As if not thinking about it would push it aside.  Childish, magical thinking.

You’d be surprised how often it worked. “Just talk to me.”

STREAKER, TRUSTING.

O-okay. 

VOICEOVER:

Sometimes the confident voice won out over common sense. This was one of those times.  Streaker slumped for a moment, head falling between the shoulder struts of…whoever’s body he was in, before lolling upward.  

STREAKER:

Just scared, you know?

NIGHTBEAT:

I know.

VOICEOVER;

I knew. All too well. Or at least, I could make a very educated guess.

STREAKER:

I mean, I thought I was scared before.  You know, when I ran over here.  THICK SWALLOW. Because this isn’t my body and I was like…where’s my body? Where am I? What happened? Where’s…me?  A LAUGH THAT SOUNDS LIKE CHOKING. More scared now.

VOICEOVER

What could I say? Sometimes the best thing you could say is nothing at all, let the truth fill up the space between words.

STREAKER

Th-they say that if you go Relinq you’re suicidal, you know? But I wasn’t. I swear.

VOICEOVER

But there was a worm of doubt in the voice, as if beginning to question it himself.  A hand scrubbed over the face, just awkward enough to signal it wasn’t used to these contours.

STREAKER

I mean, you’re desperate, right? But there’s a difference between desperate and willing to, you know, let go.

VOICEOVER:

It wasn’t the first time I’d been the recipient of this sort of last confessions. It never got easier.

I didn’t want it to get easier. Because if it ever did, I’d know there would be a countdown clock over my head, till I was giving this kind of sloppy, solipsistic confession to someone else, forcing a stranger to be the guardian of my last thoughts.

STREAKER

I just wanted the peace. Just for a bit. I just wanted a few cycles where I didn’t have to worry.

VOICEOVER

 Self-blame in the voice, thick and musky.  But really, what was to hold against someone for wanting some respite?

“We’ll find who’s responsible,” I told him. A sop, a small offering, but it was the best I could offer, in the moment.

STREAKER

I don’t care who did it. I mean, my body. I want…I want to know who put me here, alive. Who pulled me out of whiteout…where I was happy?

VOICEOVER

That?  That was a very good question.  The crime would have been perfect, and Streaker would have taken the fall, and no one known anything, Streaker slowly succumbing to spark degradation in the fizzy solace of a whiteout chamber. If not for this. And it said a lot he'd rather have died in a whiteout vacuum than be awake and alive. 

“I can promise you I’ll find out,”  I said. No lie, all truth. Something was dirty here. Very dirty. And when it started killing, that’s when I stepped in to clean up.

STREAKER

All right.  VOICE STARTS TO FUZZ AND FADE.  Hey, Nightbeat.

VOICEOVER

The first use of my name got my attention: a hello. A goodbye. A last desperate hand thrust out by a mech falling into the void, trying to force bravado so he didn’t have to go out sounding like a loser.

STREAKER

Guess you were right. Gonna  have to carry…me….oooooouuuu.....

[***]

 

“"And so what you're saying," Quark said, settling his glass precisely back in the wet ring it had sweat onto the table, "is that there's a cover up."  
  
"I didn't say that." Not in so many words.  But Quark got it, just like Quark got that that wasn't exactly a 'no', either.  He hadn’t been Nightbeat’s friend for ages and not learned how to read him.  Something about his job, maybe, the ability to notice fine details. "Just sayin' never seen Syk do that before."

“Maybe it’s a new strain.”  

“Maybe.” Noncommittal, burying his doubt in a swallow of engex. “Dangerous new strain, though.”  
  
Quark's mouth pursed, his optics fixed on his glass, as though weighing something floating on the surface.  "...I could get a sample."

A flicker of interest from the red optics.  

“We do chem tests for the Security Forces,” Quark said, slowly, laying out the steps, to convince himself it wasn’t quite as illegal as it was. “By contract. I could do a little search, at least.”   That wouldn’t be that bad, right? Just a little query?  Surely no one would notice one data ping. Besides, the story was in the news, and at worst, he figured, he’d get a slap on the wrist for indulging macabre curiosity.

It would tarnish his pristine record though, and his mouth chewed on it, weighing that against his friendship with Nightbeat.  They’d been friends since he’d met Nightbeat, glowing with pleasure at his acceptance to the Security Academy, and he’d bought everyone in Maccadam’s a round to celebrate. It had been a weird introduction, but things had just...flowed, in strange, organic ways Quark couldn’t quite explain, since then.

“You could,” Nightbeat said, trying hard not to weight the scale one way or the other.

“It’s just Syk,” Quark repeated, but it didn’t sound any better, honestly.  If it was a new kind of Syk that could cause this sort of…really coincidental hallucination, it was dangerous.  “It would mean dangerous things about those Decepticons,” he  added, after a moment.

“Nah, I don’t see it.” Nightbeat frowned. “Why’d they want something that poisoned their own kind? If there’s a toxic strain of Syk, if it’s on purpose, it’s to get rid of the menial classes.”

“Or is it?”  Quark pursed his mouth. “They are too numerous. This would winnow them down. Even by their own kind. Survival of the strongest, isn’t that what this Megatron is always preaching?”  He wouldn’t put it past them. The menial classes for all their talk of equality and freedom seemed singularly ill-equipped to handle it.  Promise everything and fail to deliver? Sooner or later, mechs would catch on.

Nightbeat scowled, his red optics drifting over the crowded tables as a hint. Those very menial classes surrounded them, Quark realized, buried deep enough in their own troubles not to heed anything Quark had said.  The news screen above the bar flickered to life, red text blaring for urgency that most ignored, too stuck in their own stuff.

Lurid, Quark thought, the lights in the bar, the sordid company. But Nightbeat liked places like this, and if Quark were honest, he rather liked the subdued thrill of it all, mixing daintily with the lower classes, like oil in water. And the news was just as lurid, the camera’s optic fixed on the destruction of an apartment, in Translucentia. The name caught his attention, and his caught attention snagged Nightbeat’s.  

“Huh,” Nightbeat said, edging forward in his seat.  “Speaking of coincidences.”  

The din of the bar drowned out the announcer’s report, but Quark got enough to figure out the basics: crime scene, bloody death, pursuit. “Streaker? That’s who you said—“

“Yeah,” NIghtbeat’s mouth pursed. “That’s what he said his name was, too. And his registration came as an airframe. Thought it was just a simple mixup, clerical snafu, wrong spark in the body.”

“But if that’s his body,” Quark’s slim hand gestured toward the shrapnel they were digging out of a transit conduit.

“Long way from Rodion’s Relinq,” Nightbeat finished for him.  “And not just there for sightseeing, either. Not if gearstick Prowl is involved.”  

“But,” Quark spoke slowly, hating the logical thoughts marching across his cortex, because they disrupted just about everything he wanted to believe about the world, “that means that whoever was in Streaker’s body, took it on purpose, for that purpose.”

Nightbeat nodded.  “Looks like.”  He took a slow drink of his engex. “Still thinking it’s Decepticons?”

“Could be,” Quark said. “I mean, killing a Senator?  After the attack on Decimus?”

“Not what I asked. Asked if you still thought it was.”

Quark gave pinched little scowl. “I think that I don’t have enough data to have an opinion.”

“What I’m thinking,” Nightbeat said, “is Streaker had some ‘con sympathies, maybe, and an airframe, which they needed for this attack. I mean, Translucentia Heights wouldn’t let anyone just stroll in.” Even in the newsvid, the building complex was only visible from a distance. Quark could practically hear the reporter chafe from here, thwarted of a properly gruesome video package.

“Apophenia,” Quark said, thoughtfully, a moment later.  

“Yeah?”

“That involved a Relinquishment Clinic, too. And you argued it wasn’t Decepticons.”

Nightbeat nodded. “Yeah, so Streaker, you know, was used to frame Decepticons. Someone wants to blame them.  Cui bono, as they say.”

Quark considered, swirling his nearly-empty glass. “Who benefits, indeed. The obvious answer is the government, but that would be....,” his words trailed off.  It would be dangerous to speak of, for one thing, surrounded by all these audials.  

“Crazy,” Nightbeat finished for him, on the same wavelength. “It’d be crazy.”  Nightbeat looked down at his own glass, with only dark dregs at the bottom, and then looked up, pitching his voice a bit loudly. “I don’t know about you, though, but I’m beat.”

“It is late,” Quark agreed.  He could feel a tightness, almost wriggling and excited, in his chassis, as he finished off his own glass, moving to the edge of the banquette.

Nightbeat tilted over, slipping some shanix into the slot for payment, before rising with the smaller mech. “Feel like company on the walk home?”  

“I do,” Quark said, fussing over his dermal plating, before looking up. This was bigger than just a favor to Nightbeat, riskier than a slap on the servos.  But this was also bigger in a more important way: could he follow a government that framed innocents? That callously let mechs like Streaker die?  He didn’t want to do anything, really: Quark was a safe mech who liked his safe little world, except for the spice of Nightbeat’s tales. And those were always sanitized, from a distance. He’d be plunging himself right into one of them, perhaps the biggest one of all.

He squared his shoulders, meeting Nightbeat’s gaze. “Because I kind of feel like doing something a little....crazy.”

 


End file.
